Off Into the Sunset
by Lady Altair
Summary: If there were such things as endings, so few would be happy.


**Title: **Off Into the Sunset

**Author: **Lady Altair

**Rating: **PG-13

**Summary: **If there were such things as endings, so few would be happy.

* * *

i.

She doesn't even flinch when the heavy iron of the cell door creaks open, and Charlie despairs; another innocent life sucked away in the despair of Azkaban. When he crouches next to her, she doesn't notice, gaze still fixed blankly on the grey stone of the cell wall, face immobile, her sickly thin white arms tucked in a feeble gesture of protection across her chest.

He should have just kept his seat when, in the din of celebration, someone remembered Azkaban. He should've just kept his seat, but his seat was next to his crying mother, a vacant George, and the 'liberation of Azkaban' seemed like a rite of victory. It seemed like an escape, one last round of victory to revel in.

It's his seventh cell, the last of the corridor, and the seventh soulless shell; there is no victory here, the 'liberators' are only tallying the price they've paid, and it grows steeper with every opened cell. Despair is heavy on everyone's shoulders; the walls seem saturated with it, even with the Dementors driven away. More lives wasted. He came here hoping to escape mourning Fred, but Charlie's only found something far vaster to haunt his nights.

He doesn't even notice when she turns her head, looks at him mournfully, eyes lit with something a little less than humanity. "Not real," she whispers at him, her hand reaching out to touch his face. Charlie lands hard on the flagstone floor, startled back by her action. She pulls her hand back slowly. "Sorry," she whispers again, in a voice long out of use. "Haven't had hallucinations in months, my manners have gone," she apologizes in an eerily calm voice, slow and gentle.

Hope, light and painfully foreign anymore, buoys his heart and he manages a half gasp of air before he sinks back down. "I'm not a hallucination, I'm here to take you away. Azkaban is being emptied, Voldemort is dead, and you're free!"

She strokes her long, filthy hair nervously, shaking her head and tucking her chin down as though to block him out. "You mustn't say such things," she frets, "I know you can't help it, but you mustn't, you mustn't. I don't mind if you stay and chat, Hallucination, but you mustn't say such things, because they hear. _They'll come around_, make my head bleed flowers for them to steal."

Charlie temporarily abandons any attempt to convince her of his reality. "What's your name?" he asks, gentling the thrill that had powered his exclamation.

She won't look at him, but her brow furrows. "I'm…I-" she stops and hesitantly looks up to meet his eyes. "I'm innocent."

Charlie, still on his knees beside her, cries. This sits better with the girl who can't remember her name, can't remember any single thing save her innocence. "'s'all right," she coos, patting his arm lightly. "'s'all right if you cry. They don't care if you cry, so that's all right."

Charlie has to carry her out; the Healers say she probably hasn't moved in a few weeks, all her muscles are atrophied. She screams pathetically, begs him not to take her when he picks her up, too weak to voice her protests too long, too weak to even flail against him.

She's the only soul in the entire winding maze of Azkaban. She makes a pretty feature article in The Prophet; they call her the Queen of Azkaban, until an old Ravenclaw dormmate (no family, no friends) comes forward with a name for her, one too dull and plain for the splashy prose they rewrite her ordinary, muggleborn life with. They fill a page in the middle of the paper with her sensationalized story, framed around eerily still photographs of a happy, ordinary girl, pilfered from an abandoned row house in York and from badly memory-charmed muggle relatives.

There's some vague resemblance to the nightmare-plagued wraith languishing in the Closed Ward, who rips at her face with her fingernails at the sound of laughter, fears every bit of happiness around her. But no one wants to see_ her_.

She falls out of the papers quickly enough; there's more novel tragedy to exploit. No one wants to remember Azkaban; better to remember the Ministry Prison Block, and all the good, innocent people who were freed, who could give interviews about fighting for the light and subsisting on hope. There's no obituary when she kills herself in the Closed Ward, when Azkaban claims its final victim at last.

She's buried with her mother, father, and sister near York, three muggle graves that all the bear the same date; more innocent casualties that the Wizarding world will never truly honor. In attendance are Charlie Weasley and the old housemate. All she can say is, "She was such a nice girl, such a shame."

Charlie never goes to mourn at Fred's grave; he figures his brother wouldn't mind, Fred never lacks for visitors. He goes to Laura Morgan's bare, lonely grave and mourns for her, for all the others who have no one left to cry for them.

* * *

ii.

Emily Montgomery holds her breath, it feels, for the first five years of her son's life. He looks _too much _like Ben, and sometimes in her nightmares, the faces merge, and Greyback appears and…

She always wakes up choking, and, after twenty minutes or so of standing in Ryan's doorway watching him breathe, cuddles up to her husband (who can sleep through anything, bless him), awake for the rest of the night.

The nightmares stop some time after his sixth birthday. Ryan stops resembling her little brother so much; or maybe the resemblance lives on. Maybe he looks more and more like Ben should have, had he grown so old, but her memories of him, forever five years old, end at Platform 9 ¾.

The sad dreams that haunt her are no longer of Ben's cruel, violent death, but of hopes and happiness, of weddings and graduations and _life, _when she can't tell who she's dreaming of, her son or her brother, can't tell if she's dreaming of a future possible, or one forever lost.

* * *

iii.

Neville doesn't know what to make of the girl who shows up to the call in July, her hair braided away from her face, no makeup, a simple white vest top; no overtures at elegance, no attempts to cover the fresh, shiny mess of scars along her chest, arms, neck and back.

Perhaps it is something inherently Lavender Brown that, even without the flash and glitter, she still turns heads. She turns Neville''ve just finished clearing some of the rubble from a collapsed wall and the sun is shining into the corridor; her hair, brown lit golden, is frizzing out of its plait, masonry dust sticking to her skin and scars, and she's smiling past the ruin, her fingers running over the thick, warped tissue on her throat, out into the sunny grounds and all he thinks is _I could look at you all day._

He feels a little guilty when Seamus materializes out of the cloud of dust, congratulating the group on rocks well vanished, but it dissipates when the quiet, thoughtful smile on Lavender's face fades, as her eyes follow Seamus as he heads off, wondering aloud about lunch. Seamus doesn't look back for her.

The look on Lavender's face is so quietly, subtly stricken as Seamus walks away from her without half a glance.

Seamus is teasing some Hufflepuff sixth year over lunch, and she's blushing and giggling and swatting at him playfully, and Lavender turns her face away, her attention too avidly locked on the conversation Parvati's having with Susan about the state of the top floor of Gryffindor Tower. Neville wants to hex the two of them, some no account girl who'd walked away, who'd let others fight, who could still giggle and tease and walk unscarred because she'd not _been here_, fighting when it mattered, and Seamus, for preferring her to Lavender, who had given him so much of herself when she had none to spare, who _needs_ him now and is being left in the dust.

"Need an extra wand on the greenhouses later." He doesn't really look at her, settles into the empty spot on the bench beside her and grabs a sandwich. Lavender looks over and smiles a bit.

"Got a wand," she rasps, tilting her head in a remnant of her old flash, tempered down to proud, quiet grace. _Here _is the lioness the Sorting Hat saw, a lifetime ago, plain and unfettered.

"Good," he nods at her, turning back to his lunch. Seamus' new poor-man's-Lavender squeals a giggle a little down the table, and the woman next to him doesn't quite flinch. She's staring into her empty mug, he nudges at her arm. "Anything interesting in there?" he asks, to distract. "I always forget, how many times do you stir? And is it counter-clockwise, or the other way? You remember how hopeless I was in Divination."

Here she might've chattered, once, might've shoved her mug up in his face and detailed the symbols in the cup, what they meant, how love and luck awaited, foretold in the sludge of loose leaves at the bottom. She'd always had something bright to see in the tea leaves, something hopeful for anyone with a teacup left unattended a moment too long. The Anti-Trelawney, foretelling futures rosy.

She only fishes out a sodden tea bag, neat and mundane, looks at him in a way that is not quite sad and says nothing.

* * *

iv.

Susan Bones has, in place of the distinguished career everyone expected of her, a checkered file with the DMLE. Multiple reprimands for insubordination and excessive use of force in the line of duty, she's not the expected successor to her aunt, not Department Head material, but no one even contemplates any sort of raid without making sure hers is the first wand around the door frame, because she's the exact sort of crazy that makes a first-rate Enforcer, the exact sort of crazy that makes her so unfit for any sort of authority.

And no one likes her. She's snarly and short-fused, and if she hadn't singlehandedly saved the arses of three quarters of her Enforcer contingent, including two of her superiors, no one would even tolerate her.

* * *

v.

"Get the fuck over it, George." Angelina snaps, clutching her terry robe close around her chest.

He looks up at her, arms tied up in his shirt, and he can barely focus his eyes through the hangover. He can still snarl at her, "_Get the fuck over it?"_

"Yes, George, _get over it."_

It's probably best his hands are restrained, he might actually strangle her. She manages to look unfairly condemnatory, considering her similar state of undress. He can't even address what she's said, so he just attacks her.

"Such a great friend you are, Ange!"

"What, because I'm tossing your arse out? Done feeling sorry for you, done enabling your selfishness."

And that wasn't what he meant, George only realizes when his throat closes up. Angelina seems to notice him choke, and catches the Quaffle on the rebound.

"Don't you even dare use Katie against me! That's what you meant, you prick? If I've betrayed her, then what've you done?" Angelina pushes George out of the bedroom and slams the door. "You have thirty seconds to get dressed before I'm pushing you into the hall, and I'm not joking!"

He's pulling his trousers on with some difficulty when she starts screaming again. "You're not the only fucking person in the world who had something terrible happen to them! Guess what? Some people lost more, lost worse than you! Have you even seen Alicia? If you had spent sixty seconds in Alicia's hospital room, you would shut the fuck up. Because you know, _she _isn't lying in bed all day toasted off booze-fueled Daydream Charms and fuck knows she has more of a right than your sorry arse. So don't you rip me about being a 'great friend', you fuck. Don't you dare."

George is just about out the front door when Angelina's voice catches him one more time. "Don't tell Katie what we did."

"I think she deserves to know," George replies, mockingly pious.

"_We _don't deserve that relief, George Weasley. You'd hurt her to make yourself feel all clean and vindicated, so quash your selfishness for five fucking seconds."

George doesn't go back to the flat all day, and Katie's frantic when he finally walks in, throws her arms around him with that uncanny accuracy. He feels wretched when her eyes still meet his; even blind, she still knows where to look and the relief on her scarred-up face makes George sick.

He can't bring himself to tell her. He just breaks down crying, drags her down to the floor with him.

She thinks it's Fred—it's always about Fred, and she's so endlessly patient—and soothes him. George pretends her repeated insistences that 'it's all right' are forgiveness for what he's done, and not meaningless apology.

* * *

vi.

Oliver Wood loves to fly.

He always has. From the minute his mam set him onto her broomstick and let him pretend he was steering while she flew him around the garden (and his da stood nervously ready with his wand, waiting for his wife to catch sight of a Snitch and drop their son in pursuit), he loved to fly.

When he leaves Hogwarts, the memory of Colin Creevey's dead weight on his shoulder, Oliver decides to keep flying, any which way he can manage. Any which way at all.

Oliver's seen enough of the wizarding world for now. He only sends word to his family, he doesn't go home. He exchanges a decent amount of gold at Gringotts and awkwardly navigates the Muggle underground, eventually finding his way to London Heathrow.

He dumps the money on the nearest counter, startling the muggle woman in the neatly pressed navy skirt behind the counter.

"Anywhere," he answers her query as to destination, and turning to half-smile at the middle-aged muggle man who's frozen beside him, strange plastic card half-way extended to another woman behind the desk, directing a confused, bewildered look at the young man beside him who's just dumped a small fortune onto the counter.

She looks at him skeptically. "Anywhere? Would you like a direct flight to your destination?"

"No. I want to go somewhere far away, and I want it to take as long as possible." She nods slowly, fingers slow on the button-filled rectangle in front of her. The _clacking-clack _of her fingers hastens after a minute, and she grins a little.

"I don't suppose this is a return trip?"

Oliver's pretty sure she's caught on.

* * *

vii.

There's late afternoon sunshine on her face and she's sprawled on their secondhand sofa, smiling as Ted's hands circle her swollen feet. This is probably the most heavenly moment of her life; one of those where there's not a single whisp of doubt that this is a happier life she's bought for herself, when there isn't even the slightest stain of regret in her peripheral vision. Andomeda's life is annotated in little regrets, but this is one rare, clean page.

Andromeda runs her hands over her swollen stomach lovingly, grinning widely into the sunshine from the open window, the sun casting a pink-orange glow through her eyelids.

And then the baby cries from upstairs—panic surges through her. The baby shouldn't be crying, Nymphadora won't be born for another two weeks. They don't even _have _an upstairs in this house.

The dream bottoms out and Andromeda is sprawled on another sofa in another house, half folded laundry in piles around her. That house, that sofa, that waning sunlight, Nymphadora, Ted… dreams and decades stand between them, impassable.

She gets up for Teddy, changes his nappy and gives him a bottle and sets him in his high chair while she makes dinner for herself. And she doesn't cry; it's hard enough to breathe.

* * *

viii.

"If you want," Hestia repeats herself, for the third time, as the Dursleys mill around their kitchen. "I'm not making you do anything. Not at all. If you'd like to stay here, I'm to provide you with the resources to do so. If you'd like to return, I can facilitate that as well."

"We've made a life here! I am not going anywhere at your bidding," Vernon blusters, puce in the face, his grip on the countertop threatening the laminate. Petunia sits in her customary chair at the table, closest to the kitchen, sipping nervously at tea long gone cold, every once in a while turning back to check on Dudley, anchored against the refrigerator.

"Then I'm glad you've built a happy life, and we'll leave you alone," Hestia assures him softly. She produces an index card from her handbag, sets it on the pristine wooden tabletop. "Your bank account's had a good deal of money deposited. You're free to resume contact with your friends and family back home; they all believe you, Mr. Dursley, received a spur-of-the-moment, too-good-to-refuse promotion and had to pick up and leave. I'm sure they're all very offended by your lack of contact. You're free to come and go as you please, with no further interference from us. You can forget us entirely, go about your life knowing how thankful we are for your cooperation. We will never contact you again. You have my word. If you need anything, here is my contact information, it's just a regular telephone number. Please don't hesitate."

There's a long, long quiet in the luxury kitchen, in the luxury home the Order procured for the Dursleys. Hestia sits with these people she has lived with, _protected_, all these months and they have nothing to say to her. They never really have and she shouldn't expect anything more. They don't even think to ask about Dedalus (who sent his 'best wishes' in the form of a rude hand gesture he begged Hestia to convey), don't even ask about Megan (who would probably have a kind word for Dudley, if she weren't buried next to her father's empty grave, another sacrifice ripped from Hestia's flesh.)

Hestia cries alone on a bench at the new subdivision's half-finished playground, certain that her card is already in the bin, uncertain why she _even cares._

_

* * *

_ix.

Molly could never bear the company of Samantha Diggory; she'd never been able to.

And it's nothing to do with the woman; from the minute she appeared on the doorstep over twenty years ago, so nervous and awkward, trying to hover behind Amos despite being at least two or three inches taller. She'd been so skittish and unsure that it had taken Molly until dessert to realize how shatteringly, _unfairly _lovely she was. Tall and lithe with long golden hair and big green eyes, dressed pristinely, making it infinitely easy to believe that Muggles paid her lots of money to wear beautiful clothes. That first dinner was the last – Molly had politely sent them off with the last of the Jamaican Rum cake she'd baked and settled Charlie on her hip and wasn't too sorry to see the back of Samantha, quietly ashamed of her envy.

They'd had nothing to talk about anyway; though Arthur had grilled her over her Muggle background and experiences, Molly had nothing to say. This woman didn't know magic, didn't know children, didn't know homemaking. When pressed by Amos, who was so proud of his impossibly beautiful wife, Samantha spoke of New York and Paris and Milan, fashion shoots and runways and what stupid bit of clothing she'd had to wear for what designer. Molly had never traveled, could barely remember wearing anything that wasn't stained with drool and fingerpaint.

So they politely walk their own ways in their parallel worlds, pass occasionally in the village or in Kings Cross or Diagon and they each smile at each other in passing greeting, Samantha with her beautiful, neat little family, Molly wrangling her impossible, incorrigible brood.

They have nothing in common, and after the Third Challenge, Molly _wants _nothing in common with her. She doesn't want to know how the woman, ungreyed and ever-perfect but for the dimmed, indifferent light in her eyes, floats through her existence, lacking her son. She sends over a sympathy supper for the Diggorys, but she has Arthur bring it.

Days after the battle, after Fred's funeral, Samantha Diggory sits at Molly's battered table, abandoned teacups cooling between them.

She doesn't say she understands. She doesn't say much of anything. Samantha, the friend Molly never wanted, just sits in the empty kitchen and lets her cry.

* * *

**Notes: **Hey there to all my readers! I just wanted to say thank you again for your time, and I hope this piece was worth the wait. It was a lot more enjoyable than writing my appellate brief - now, in a choice between writing this and perhaps making y'all cry, and writing that, which will certainly make _me _cry, I'll have to take the chance. :)


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